A Circulating Fluidized Bed is a relatively new and evolving technology that has become a very efficient method of generating low-cost electricity while generating electricity with very low emissions and environmental impacts.

In a Circulating Fluidized Bed combustion process, crushed coal is mixed with limestone and fired in a process resembling a boiling fluid. The limestone removes the sulfur and converts it into an environmentally-benign powder that is removed with the ash.

Fluidized bed boilers are capable of burning a wide range of fuels cleanly, including biomass fuels such as wood
waste.

What is Fluidized Bed
Combustion?
Fluidized beds suspend solid fuels on upward-blowing jets of air during the combustion process. The result is a turbulent mixing of gas and solids. The tumbling action, much like a bubbling fluid, provides more effective chemical reactions and heat transfer.
Fluidized bed combustion evolved from efforts to find a combustion process able to control pollutant emissions without external emission controls (such as scrubbers). The technology burns fuel at temperatures of 1,400 to 1,700 degrees F, well below the threshold where
Nitrogen Oxides form (at approximately 2,500 degrees F, the nitrogen and oxygen atoms in the combustion air combine to form nitrogen oxide pollutants).

The mixing action of the fluidized bed results brings the flue gases into contact with a sulfur-absorbing chemical, such as limestone or dolomite. More than 95 percent of the sulfur pollutants in coal can be captured inside the boiler by the sorbent.

Pressurized Fluidized bed combustion (PFBC) builds on earlier work in atmospheric fluidized-bed combustion technology. Atmospheric
fluidized bed combustion is crossing over the commercial threshold, with most boiler manufacturers currently offering
fluidized bed boilers as a standard package. This success is largely due to the
Clean Coal Technology Program and the Energy Department's Fossil Energy and industry partners’ R&D.

The popularity of fluidized bed combustion
is due largely to the technology's fuel flexibility - almost any combustible material, from coal to municipal waste, can be burned - and the capability of meeting sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emission standards without the need for expensive add-on controls.

The Clean Coal Technology Program led to the initial market entry of 1st generation pressurized fluidized bed technology, with an estimated 1000 megawatts of capacity installed worldwide. These systems pressurize the fluidized bed to generate sufficient flue gas energy to drive a gas turbine and operate it in a combined-cycle.

The 1st generation pressurized fluidized bed combustor uses a "bubbling-bed" technology. A relatively stationary fluidized bed is established in the boiler using low air velocities to fluidize the material, and a heat exchanger (boiler tube bundle) immersed in the bed to generate steam. Cyclone separators are used to remove particulate matter from the flue gas prior to entering a gas turbine, which is designed to accept a moderate amount of particulate matter (i.e., "ruggedized").

A 2nd generation pressurized fluidized bed combustor uses "circulating
fluidized-bed" technology and a number of efficiency enhancement measures.
Circulating fluidized-bed technology has the potential to improve operational characteristics by using higher air flows to entrain and move the bed material, and
re-circulating nearly all the bed material with adjacent high-volume, hot cyclone separators. The relatively clean flue gas goes on to the heat exchanger. This approach theoretically simplifies feed design, extends the contact between sorbent and flue gas, reduces likelihood of heat exchanger tube erosion, and improves SO2 capture and combustion efficiency.

A major efficiency enhancing measure for 2nd generation pressurized fluidized bed combustor is the integration of
coal gasification to produce Synthesis
Gas. This fuel gas is combusted in a topping combustor and adds to the combustor's flue gas energy entering the gas turbine, which is the more efficient portion of the combined cycle. The topping combustor must exhibit flame stability in combusting low-Btu gas and low-NOx emission characteristics. To take maximum advantage of the increasingly efficient commercial gas turbines, the high-energy gas leaving the topping combustor must be nearly free of particulate matter and alkali/sulfur content. Also, releases to the environment from the pressurized fluid bed combustion system must be essentially free of mercury, a soon-to-be regulated
hazardous air pollutant.

Efforts are ongoing at the Power Systems Development Facility (PSDF) in Wilsonville, Alabama to ensure critical components and subsystems are ready for demonstration of 2nd generation pressurized fluidized bed combustion. The PSDF is operated by Southern Company Services under DOE contract to conduct cooperative R&D with industry.

Tests conducted at the PSDF in 1998 verified that a newly developed multi-annular swirl burner (MASB) provided the needed flame stability and low-NOx performance characteristics. Tests of promising new hot gas filter components and systems are continuing at the PSDF. Advances made to date in this critical technology area include the development of clay-bonded silicon carbide candle filters and the associated filter vessel. Efforts are currently focused on improved candle filter materials for enhanced durability under extreme temperatures and corrosive environment. New ceramics and ceramic-metallic composites are showing promise. Those passing laboratory screening tests will undergo testing at the PSDF.

Dry
Sorbent Injection
is
a post-combustion technology wherein a reactive calcium or
sodium based sorbent is injected into the upper part of the furnace to react directly with the
products of combustion that effectively and economically mitigates potential
emissions problems in the flue gas including HCI, HF, SO2 and SO3.

Dry
Sorbent Injection advantages include lower equipment costs (first cost) as
well as decreases in operations and maintenance costs - and have a lower
life-cycle cost than other technologies. Commonly used sorbents include reactive
calcium, sodium and powdered activated carbon.

Controlling
pollutants such as SO2 can also be accomplished by converting the products of
combustion into sulfuric acid, or SO3, by passing the flue gas over a catalyst bed.

Fluidized Bed Combustion allows for greater than 90 percent
reduction of harmful emissions (such as SO2) and also reduces the amount of thermal NOx formed because
plants are operating at a much lower temperature than conventional boilers.

A
"Circulating Fluidized Bed"
plant eliminated most of the pollutants inside the furnace as the biomass or
coal is burned. Crushed limestone, when added to the coal as it enters the combustor, captures 90 percent of sulfur pollutants.
Fluidized Bed Combustion allows for a “slow burn” that reduces the formation of NOx.
Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle plants involve the gasification of coal
or biomass, cleaning the gas, and combusting it in a gas turbine generator to produce
electricity.

“spending
hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars every year for
oil, much of it from the Middle East, is just about the single stupidest
thing that modern society could possibly do. It’s very difficult to think of anything
more idiotic than that.”
~ R. James Woolsey, Jr., former Director of the CIA

According to R. James Woolsey, for Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, “The basic insight is to realize that global warming, the geopolitics of oil, and warfare in the Persian Gulf are not separate problems — they are aspects of a single problem, the West’s dependence on oil.”